A Journey in Audio Editing History: Part 5

Superior sonic quality of tape and ease of editing of (digital audio on) DAWs make a nice pair. A rather common strategy is to take advantage of both media during music production: record on tape and transfer later to DAW of editing and/or edit on DAW and later mixdown to tape.

A more flexible solution consists in inserting a tape machine in the signal path by recording on tape and immediately playing the signal back to the DAW, in realtime. The tape deck may be fed by live inputs or send/returns on the DAW/mixer.

A major problem of this procedure is that the output from the tape machine is delayed (see part4 about tape delays) due to the distance between the rec head and the playback head.

The following video in two parts (by Brad McGowan and Ken Mahru of Little Red Wagon Studios) shows how to time-align the delayed signal by using a latency delay plugin and DAW’s latency compensation.